Chris Heuer directed an interactive exercise designed to give conference attendees a better understanding of the new technology tools at their disposal. The exercise he used at the NYC conference can be viewed below.

Don’t let it happen again – if you hear of a VC buddy offering crazy cash for a silly idea – beat him/her across the face with a live fish – likewise if you hear an entrepreneur exaggerating their startup’s value…

Chris Heuer is sitting on the panel “How to Use Social Networking to Manage your Company and Reach your Customers” at the CEA Industry Forum. The October 16, 2007 panel focuses on “how you can position yourself in the stream with your customers by adopting a participation approach to marketing.”

Before our panel this morning, taking a turn from the pages of NewMediaJim, I tweeted a question for my friends on Twitter to see what they would want to tell the crowd at the Consumer Electronics Association Industry Forum. We received some great responses.

My Question was: what do you want to tell the consumer electronics industry about social networking and social media? Further clarified after Doug Haslam asked what help I was looking for to include: looking for insights to share on social networking that will help the executives here understand what’s important – twitter too…

My quote for the panel was “you don’t USE social networks, you join them” – which is an oversimplification of course, but I want to be deliberate about the language and the shift to collaboration and community…

I wish I could write something poetic and inspirational that would make a difference in how our leaders think about the environment, but I don’t think I have that power or ability. I do, however, have a voice, a blog and an ability to do little things every day that may make our stay on this little planet we call earth last a few years longer. I know that if we don’t take action, if we don’t raise our voices, if we don’t do all we can each and every day, it will never change. So tonight, I lend my voice to thousands of others as part of Blog Action Day – knowing that alone I can make a small difference and together we can make a big impact.

A few thoughts that have arisen today as I thought about this post:

Carbon offsets are a great way to buy a cleaner conscience, but not a great way to reduce carbon emissions – while it is probably from some very well meaning people, I am afraid it has been exploited by marketing people to simply separate people from their money. That said, it does raise awareness, so it has some really good impact, but I am unsure why everyone is so excited about it…

I saw this artist Chris Jordan on the Colbert Report who does some amazing things helping people visualize the sheer size of our waste problem. He creates art that demonstrates how much trash we really generate in a given period of time. BIG ART. His images actually include the real number of ‘things’ we use or throw away in a given period of time (such as a massive image with two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes).

Forget the global warming or global cooling debate – let’s talk about the fact that the earth is a living system – an ecosystem, in some ways very much like our own bodies. Plain common sense says that if we keep putting poisons into the system, or taking out huge numbers of natural resources, we are bound to be damaging it somehow. So let’s just all be considerate of our mother earth as we go about our day, and be a little more conscious of how we treat her….

Wow – can’t believe how long this has been in draft mode – I am all over the place over the coming months – hopefully we can catch up at some point in person and chat over some chai tea perhaps?

Today and Tomorrow, I am in San Diego on a social networking panel with Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone. We are doing a podcast from my room overlooking the ocean very shortly… the panel is tomorrow morning for the CEA Industry Forum.

I am also going to be down in Austin on November 5 & 6. We will be hosting a Social Media Club conversation on Monday November 5 and then hosting a paid Social Media Workshop all day on Tuesday November 6 sponsored by the great folks from Dell. If you are interested in attending the workshop, use my promo code CHRIS so that I can prove to the other great workshop leaders (Shel Israel, Connie Reece and Kami Huyse) that people actually read my blog! From Austin, I need to leave a few minutes early and head to the airport for an early morning speech with Marshall Kirkpatrick at BlogWorld & New Media Expo on November 7.